He was Sir Robert Dudley at the Elizabethan court, the Bard in love with Elizabethan theatre, the protestant Luther and a cowboy from Macedonia in a western by Manchevscki. In the South Africa divided by the Apartheid, he's Nelson Mandela's prison warder.

In Bille August's Goodbye Bafana, you play Mandela's prison warder. Who is James Gregory?
James Gregory is the living proof of what Mandela stated, that is, that a man can change. It's a complex character who goes through a strong social conditioning. At the beginning, this man is mainly a father and a husband. Then he gets ambitious, he decides to work in a prison and guard a special prisoner. From that moment his life will change. Mandela inspires and transforms my character, wakes him from his ignorance. The man he considered a dangerous terrorist turns out to be extraordinary and deeply human. My character evolves slowly, it takes him 20 years but the change in his perspective will finally set him free.

When did you hear about Mandela for the first time?
That was in the 1970s and I was just a little boy. Every day when I passed by the South African embassy in Trafalgar Square I heard about that man who was in prison for his strong ideas. One day I decided to sign a petition for his freedom. I remember that I felt like a true revolutionary. When he was set free in 1990, I was watching it on TV with my mother, and I never forgot our emotion.

A teaching by Mandela that you like to remember?
Once he was asked how he managed to survive 27 years in a prison, and he answered that he had to stay there for the time it was needed in order to set free his prison guardians. That's a very Zen point of view. I think it is strong and very moving.

The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond, The Last King of Scotland and now Goodbye Bafana are films that talk about Africa and denounce the abuse from the "democratic" west...
That's true, and it's important that certain abuses are told through the eyes of white people. We are the ones who used a coercive power. It is really important to challenge our own arguments in order to be able to answer certain question and too much hypocrisy. We have a very precise responsibility towards these cultures. We have to pay attention to Africa, as we have already done with Latin America.